A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far Far Away Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Paul Hirsch

  All rights reserved

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-64160-258-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hirsch, Paul, 1945– author.

  Title: A long time ago in a cutting room far, far away : my fifty years

  editing Hollywood hits; Star Wars, Carrie, Ferris Bueller’s day off, Mission: impossible, and more / Paul Hirsch.

  Description: Chicago, Illinois : Chicago Review Press Incorporated, [2020] | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019014536 (print) | LCCN 2019022238 (ebook) | ISBN 9781641602556 (cloth)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hirsch, Paul, 1945– author. | Motion picture editors—United States—Biography. | Motion pictures—Editing.

  Classification: LCC TR849.H57 A3 2020 (print) | LCC TR849.H57 (ebook) | DDC 778.593/092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019014536

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022238

  Unless otherwise indicated, all images are from the author’s collection

  Typesetting: Nord Compo

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  To Jane

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication Page

  Introduction

  1. My First Hit: Carrie

  2. Ten Years Earlier

  3. My First Feature Film

  4. Back to Trailers

  5. My Next Big Break: Benny

  6. Phantom and Its Horrors

  7. Obsession

  8. Star Wars

  9. The Fury

  10. King of the Gypsies and Home Movies

  11. The Empire Strikes Back

  12. Blow Out

  13. The Black Is Back

  14. Footloose in L.A.

  15. Protocol

  16. Ferris Bueller's Day Off

  17. The Secret of My Success

  18. Planes, Trains & Automobiles

  19. Steel Magnolias

  20. I Become a Studio Bigwig

  21. Falling Down

  22. The Trouble with Trouble

  23. Mission: Impossible

  24. Mighty Joe Young

  25. Mission to Mars

  26. Pluto Nash

  27. Lean Times

  28. Ray

  29. A Fallow Stretch

  30. Back to the Big Time

  31. The Elder Statesman

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Photos Insert

  Introduction

  IN 1975 I EDITED A FILM directed by Brian De Palma called Obsession. It was an independent production, and upon its completion no studio in Hollywood would agree to release it because of an edgy plot development. After some thought, I suggested changing one shot in the film, from a wide establishing shot of a mansion to a close-up of our star. With this one substitution, Columbia Pictures agreed to distribute the film. That is what editing can do.

  I have been working in the film business for fifty years. I have participated in big successes and big failures. At one point, I had worked on both the biggest hit of all time and the biggest flop, but I’d have to say, all in all, I have led a charmed life. This book is intended to share with you my experiences in the business, as well as some of my opinions and the insights I gleaned from the many extraordinary figures I have met and worked with.

  Think of the world’s biggest movie stars, the most powerful producers, the most talented writers, directors, and cinematographers hired by one of Hollywood’s historic studios to create a movie into which they will pour hundreds of millions of dollars to market and distribute around the world. Sometimes over a thousand people are employed on a single movie. The production crew spends weeks and months carefully prepping the shoot, building sets, designing costumes, and scouting locations. Then they spend more weeks and months shooting, often in bitter cold or broiling heat; in the rain or snow; at night, hours on end, with too little sleep, eating in tents, often twelve or more hours a day. Actors will show up hours before shooting just to be properly made up or coiffed. All this investment of time, money, creativity, and physical effort combines to provide the editor with his or her raw materials. That’s me, the editor. It’s the best job on a movie.

  Editing is a bit of a misnomer. Just as the pocket computers we all carry are called phones, even though making phone calls is just a fraction of what we use them for, editing film is just one facet of the job. We editors spend a great deal of time building up the first cut. It’s as if we are given a big box containing all the parts needed to put together a gizmo of some kind, except there is a lot of other junk in the box as well. We sift through all the footage shot each day looking for and extracting the useful parts of each angle or setup. We then cut these together into longer and longer sequences, or scenes. Sometimes these useful parts are analogous to sentences; other times they are like phrases or individual words, or even syllables, strung together to form meanings greater than their constituent parts. The shots derive their meaning from their context. Context is everything. You can take the most affecting moment of a four-hankie movie and cut it into the middle of a broad comedy, and it will seem absurd. We must choose with care how to frame the best moments. Looking through dailies (the raw footage shot on a particular day) is hunting for jewels, and once they’re found, we have to mount them to maximum effect. What precedes a shot is critical, and the art of editing is, in part, how to make each shot achieve its full potential in the sequence.

  Building the first cut is not just cutting out the “bad stuff” but, more important, putting together a collage out of bits of action and sound. Which bits the editor chooses and how they’re arranged makes his or her work unique. Not until all the scenes have been shot and each one has been built into a rough version of itself can the editing phase of postproduction really begin. This process, cutting the final version that the audience will see, is the most interesting and crucial step in the editing of a film. And because it is a process that is shared with the director, it varies as much as people differ one from the other.

  Showing a first cut to a director can be an anxious moment, especially if it is the first time you are working together. Agreeing to work for a new director is a bit of a blind date. You can meet and talk, and learn from other editors’ previous experience, but the moment of truth comes when you start collaborating to turn the rough cut into the finished film. Screening the first cut is difficult for the director too. Will all the ideas and hard work pay off? I learned on my first picture that no matter how well edited the individual sequences are, it doesn’t mean that the picture will work. But even so, it is an extremely important moment, because as director Herbert Ross used to say, “You only get one chance to see a picture for the first time.”

  The editor and director are mutually vulnerable. The editor is the director’s first audience, and any mistakes made in shooting are there on the screen for us to see. As for us editors, the director is really our only true audience. Only he or she is privy to all the choices we have made, unfiltered through anyone else’s sensibility. Consequently, the creative bond between director and editor can be extremely intimate. Ideally, each one provides emotional support to the other.

  Every picture is handmade, and consequently the editor’s sense of authorship of a film can be intense. But the culture of filmmaking forbids any
one to see the editor’s work until after the director has seen it and made changes, so editors are sometimes thought of as mere assistants to the director. Today, however, advances in technology have somewhat eroded this tradition of secrecy. The complexity of making special effects films requires early assemblies to be more widely shared than they used to be, and new technology has made it easier to do this.

  I am often asked how much discretion I have in performing my work. The truth is, I am hired to make the myriad choices that go into cutting each scene. It is very much like an actor, who may do ten takes of a scene, making a different choice each time. Only one of them is endorsed by the director and used in the film. The others are rejected. I make dozens, or even hundreds of choices a day—subject, of course, to review by the director. But that doesn’t mean that all the choices are revised. I take great pleasure in the moments in my films that are just the way I cut them the first time. The directors looked at them and decided they couldn’t be improved, like the Fonz from 1970s TV’s Happy Days checking himself in the mirror, comb in hand, then stopping and putting the comb away because he looks perfect already.

  Editing is the only aspect of filmmaking without deep roots in some earlier art form. Writing and acting come from theater. Production design has its antecedents in the theater too, as do costume, hair, and makeup. Photography has painting as its ancestor, but telling a story through a succession of images and sounds is native to the art of motion picture making. There is a relation to hieroglyphics as well as to picture books, but these are to the dynamic of film editing as the oxcart is to the space shuttle.

  The illusion that we call cinema relies on human perception and a pair of biological and psychological phenomena. One is the phi phenomenon, an optical illusion first defined in 1912 by Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology. When an object is shown in one place and then in a second place, the viewer assumes it has moved there. Film consists only of still pictures, but when they are shown at twenty-four frames per second, the displacement of the objects in the images creates the perception of motion. This is combined with a second phenomenon, persistence of vision. When the image before our eyes is suddenly changed, the earlier image remains briefly on the retina. Close your eyes. For a fraction of a second, you will see a ghost of what you had just been looking at. On these two phenomena, physical and psychological, is built a multibillion-dollar industry.

  Accompanying this illusion of movement through the rapid succession of still images is another illusion, on which editing is based: that actions spliced in sequence will appear to have occurred in the same order and time it takes to view the sequence. Suppose we have a particular sequence—CU (close-up): Handsome Movie Hunk stares lovingly; CU: Beautiful Film Goddess returns his gaze; two shot (both actors are in frame): they kiss. The audience is unaware that the kiss may have been filmed first, before the CU of the Hunk, after which the crew broke for lunch and came back to shoot the CU of the Goddess last, a process that may have taken any number of hours, depending on how many takes of each angle the director asked for and how complicated the relighting of the various shots was. We suspend our disbelief and accept that the actual sequence of events was as we see them on screen. It is this reconstruction of time that gives film its magic and makes my work fascinating.

  Occasionally, I will see a movie crew on location. A crowd gathers. They watch and watch but see very little, unless the crew is blowing up a building or performing some big stunt. But the crowd stays, because they want to get close to the magic. Well, the real magic isn’t there. It takes place when the editor combines two pieces of film and makes it seem as if one led directly to the other. Or when a whole succession of images in montage creates an impression the way a poem does.

  In an effort to communicate what it is all about, editing is often described as being like other art forms. It’s like sculpting with clay, in a way, because you can add bits or take them away. It’s like architecture, because visual structures are created, with foundations and an eye to grace, proportion, and balance. It’s like choreography, except that instead of organizing movement in a three-dimensional space over a given amount of time, movement is organized in a two-dimensional plane, and instead of music giving the movement its shape, it may be dialogue. It’s like writing, when rearranging the order of shots creates a new meaning. Editing has been referred to as the final rewrite of the script. Others have said you make a movie three times: once in the script, once in the shooting, and once in the editing.

  Editing is like all of these other art forms, yet unique. A painting presents itself to the viewer as a totality. When we approach one in a museum or gallery we see the entire work, and only as we get closer do we see its details. The artist exerts only some control over the order in which we see these details. We can start looking at the top, the bottom, or wherever the composition leads our eye. With a sculpture, we walk around it, seeing it from different perspectives to grasp its entirety. Buildings’ designs reveal themselves even more gradually. First we see the exterior, and then the interior through a number of different paths. Only later, when we mentally reconstruct our experience, do we “see” the entire work. The architect can exert only limited control of the order in which we experience the building’s details.

  Literature reveals itself to the reader in a different way. The reader must follow the path created by the author. Unlike in the visual arts, the details are meted out in precisely the order chosen by the author, divulging information in a carefully considered way. We grasp the totality of a written work only when we have completed the predetermined journey through it.

  Music is similar, with a big exception: the rate at which we travel on the path is determined as well. A book may be read in a single session or over the course of weeks or months. Music comes to us at a controlled pace, and it is in this regard that film most resembles it. Filmmakers need to consider not only in what order to deliver the information but also when and at what pace.

  Film has become the preeminent visual art of our time because it combines many of the arts at once. It manifests many of the concerns of the painter, for beautiful or expressive images; it tells stories that reveal character and observations about the human condition; and it controls the rate at which the elements of the picture are delivered to the audience, slowing or accelerating as the needs of the picture require. It employs all the cinematic arts to reach not only the eyes and ears of the audience, but also their hearts.

  The language of cinema has evolved since the earliest films. The limits imposed on the creators of silent films led to ingenious and sometimes poetic visual solutions to problems. The advent of sound set visual storytelling back for a while, but over the years, directors have found new and exciting ways to move the camera. Audiences now accept fragmented time (with stories moving backward and forward), alternate realities (like dreams and memories), and compressed or elongated time (such as slow motion or time lapse, even changing seasons in a single shot). The pace of cutting can become frantic, with audiences barely able to keep up with the action.

  Editing is central to creating the magic. In the obscurity of the cutting room, we transform painstakingly filmed records of staged but actual events into love stories, space fantasies, mysteries, comedies, journeys to the far ends of the galaxy, back into prehistoric time, or far into the future. It is great fun. Or can be, depending on whom you are working for.

  The first complete assembly is also called the editor’s cut, but I prefer first cut. To me, editor’s cut implies that it reflects our vision of how the film should be cut. Actually, it includes all the scenes that were shot, in their totality, and usually in the order the screenwriter originally specified. Often this is not the ideal sequencing, and even more often there are scenes, or parts of scenes, that would contribute best to the finished film by being cut out. I have been asked how to tell if a film has been well edited. It’s not always a simple matter. Sometimes my major contribution on a film is taking a scene out.
With the scene removed, the film may acquire a better flow or even a sense of mystery and tension. As Michelangelo said, “Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.”

  The real reflection of how well a film has been cut is the totality of the finished film. Identifying what is superfluous, and choosing how to put together what remains, make the difference between a good version of a film and a great one. In putting the picture together, we often have a keen sense of this before anyone else. An actual editor’s cut would reflect how we think the film should be and might be very different indeed from the first cut. However, including all the material at the outset is the most sensible way to proceed. With everything up there, the director and editor can begin to pare away and restructure until the final form is achieved.

  In practice, the first cut is hardly ever satisfactory, no matter how hard the editor has worked to make it brilliant. It occasionally does happen that the script was written to perfection and the shooting went well too. In this case the film can be locked—stay unchanged—very soon after the end of shooting. A crucial part of finishing a film, or any work of art, is knowing when to stop.

  What goes into the choices that I make? My approach to editing has always been strongly related to music. Part of my response is as a dancer, feeling the tempo of the music and reacting to it. What if there is no music? As editors, we are always dealing with tempo, whether there is music or not. The rhythm may be in the way the actors speak—slowly or rapidly, the stressed syllables like beats in music and the unstressed syllables like the space between the beats. A pace is created, and a pattern of beats to come is implied. My choice of cutting point is made by feeling the pace and placing the change of image at a moment that fits into the rhythmic pattern. Like when a dancer counts “Five, six, seven, eight” to set the pace of the dance to come, I have to be sensitive to the ideal moment between the beats.

  It’s not just speech that creates rhythm and tempo. Each action has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The time between the beginning and the end can vary tremendously and sets up a tempo that must be observed to gauge the correct placement of the cut. I had an assistant who, when he started cutting, would say, “Every frame is a potential cut.” This is both true and not, and it is my job to choose those cutting points with care and artistry. Walking or running is another example of rhythm in motion. I have found that when cutting a horse galloping, the ideal point to cut is when all four of the horse’s hooves are in the air. It is similar to the bar line in written music. It is not on the beat but just before the beat that is often the best place for a cut. Sometimes I think of cutting as swinging from vine to vine; you let go of one and grab the next at precisely the crucial moment.